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I wonder if there will be a day that we will understand what dissociation really is.  It seems that people talk about it and write about ‘as if’ at least someone has actually defined it.  Coming from my severe infant-childhood abuse background, I don’t believe anyone is much past the dark ages in terms of actually knowing what dissociation is.

In looking at the abstract for this 2007 article by Dr. Matthias Michal and colleagues, Depersonalization, Mindfulness, and Childhood Trauma, I can’t even get the first sentence before I find myself in disagreement with one of the main premises of this ‘expert opinion’ of an experience related to dissociation:

“Depersonalization (DP), i.e., feelings of being detached from one’s own mental processes or body, can be considered as a form of mental escape from the full experience of reality. This mental escape is thought to be etiologically linked with maltreatment during childhood. The detached state of consciousness in DP contrasts with certain aspects of mindfulness, a state of consciousness characterized by being in touch with the present moment.”

Here again I see yet another example of what I call ‘sloppy science’.  Researchers seem to build their hypothesis into their studies in such a way that they are nearly guaranteed to supposedly prove their own point.  Nobody wants to publish failure research.

The gulf that exists between infant-child abuse survivors and those who study us like we are some malformed off shoots of what is considered normal continues to widen because the basic premises researchers use to discover facts about so-called ‘reality’ come from their own ‘mental processes’ that they never question within themselves.

I know what depersonalization feels like because I live with it.  My body-brain formed through trauma that did not allow me as a person to exist from the time I was born.  So, NO, this cannot “be considered as a form of mental escape from the full experience of reality.”  Sorry to disappoint you well-funded and supposedly well meaning wise ones.

Mind, itself, along with its relatives ‘mental’ and ‘mindful’ exist as metaphors for physiological, very real molecular operations within the structures of the body-brain.  The operations that are suggested to represent ‘mind’ happen through biochemical interactions.  Early experiences from conception onward during the critical growth windows, or periods of specific development form circuits and pathways that are not the same for infant-childhood severe trauma and abuse survivors.

The experience of dissociation, depersonalization and derealization are connected to the physiological changes our early developing body-brain was forced to make in the midst of trauma.  In my experience, and I suspect for many other people, what I experience as dissociation is NOT any “form of escape from the full experience of reality.

IT IS MY REALITY.

I cannot “escape from the full experience” of my reality as long as I exist in this trauma-changed-during-development body that does not process information in the same way as the (evidently) NOT trauma changed body of the researchers who define the terms and design the research that names something survivors live with that these researchers will never REALLY know a damn thing about.

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“The detached state of consciousness in DP contrasts with certain aspects of mindfulness, a state of consciousness characterized by being in touch with the present moment.”

I am not going to ever say that there is not a contrast between the way I experience life in the body I live in and the way a non trauma built body person experiences life.  But what the “H” does “being in touch with the present moment” even BEGIN to mean?  What, exactly, does these researchers’ term “detached state of consciousness” even begin to mean?

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I will try to describe to you an experience I had yesterday that has brought this subject into my ‘mindful awareness’ tonight.  I recognized the experience because it was so familiar to me.  I know the state, I know the feeling, I know what it WAS with every sense I possess.

The event was a simple one.  Nothing in particular happened at any point yesterday up until the instant I am going to tell you about.  I was out running errands in the morning in the small town I live near, and had just driven over to my favorite spot to meet my friend for a simple lunch at our local laundromat café.

I pulled into the spacious, nearly empty parking lot, reached to turn off the motor of my car and as I was in the act of pulling my key out of the ignition I froze in the instant my eyes passed by the ‘visual’ of my steering wheel.

I’ve owned this particular car for over four years.  I’ve driven it hundreds of times.  There was nothing, absolutely nothing different about my driving it yesterday.  And yet in the split second my visual field passed over my steering wheel I had the most strange, bizarre feeling that this was NOT my steering wheel.  I had never seen it before.  Did someone change my steering wheel and give me a different one?  Not likely.

Not only did it not look right, and was not shaped ‘right’, it wasn’t attached to the steering column at the ‘right’ angle.  Nothing about the steering wheel looked or seemed remotely familiar to me.  I pulled out the key and sat staring at that steering wheel for a full five minutes as my brain scanned for information about both the nature of the wheel itself and the experience I was having in relationship to it.

I searched, just in case, for any kind of button or possible means to shift or tilt the angle of the wheel.  The car is a 1978 model that has no such option.  The only information that I could possibly find in my brain was the familiar realization that who I was at that moment, sitting in that car behind the steering wheel, was in some way not related to any one of me that had ever been in that car before that instant.

Yes, I knew about every other usual familiar aspect of Linda and of my life.  But I was SEEING that steering wheel for the first time in my life.  Am I supposed to believe that only at this single instant I simply became ‘mindfully conscious and aware’ of my steering wheel?  I wish, oh how I wish the explanation could be that simple.

Was I somehow suddenly in a different reality?  Was I somehow (using researcher logic) suddenly in an ATTACHED rather than in a “detached state of consciousness?”  Did something magically happen that snapped me into “being in touch with the present moment?”  Am I (chuckle, chuckle!) supposed to believe that I have, until that instant, needed some form of “mental escape” from the reality of my automobile’s steering wheel?

Hogwash.

I have thousands and thousands and thousands of running-time and space memories from 18 years of extreme trauma and abuse from my infant-childhood that were simply never actually connected to me.  How could they have been when the abuse began at the moment I was born, far before my brain had formed any neurological abilities to process the information of myself in my life beyond the absolute ‘born with’ essentials?

Picture a child’s toy of a spinning top.  Pick one tiny point on the top, and imagine it spinning at full speed.  Imagine a newborn ‘self’ with senses to the world attached to that single spot as the spinning goes on minute after minute, day in and day out, year after year.  Never did the insanity of the abuse of my childhood actually end.  Never was I safe.  Never did anything make any sense.  Never was there any real cause and effect.  There was – continually and always – no opportunity for me to form my own thoughts, to have my own feelings, to find my own self, anywhere in my body-brain forming years as my mother’s traumatized daughter.

Evidently, for some inexplicable reason, as I reached to remove the keys from my car’s ignition yesterday, while I was under no particular stress, about to have a good lunch and a relaxing visit with my friend, a millisecond snapshot was taken by my being of exactly and specifically ONE THING – the steering wheel of my car.  The top stopped spinning, frozen for one instant of time, as the ME that lives inside this body, and processes my life with this chaos-built traumatized brain saw one particular slice of my life – of my reality — perfectly in focus, absolutely clearly:  My steering wheel.

Did I feel remote at that instant?  Yes.  Did I feel like a stranger in my body, in my car, in that parking lot, at that instant of time?  Yes.  Do I remember this feeling from my childhood?  Yes.  Any memory I have of my childhood is a snapshot, or what is called a flashbulb trauma memory.

My brain did not form itself to process information so-called normally.  I live in what I call a ‘parallel’ life where time and space are related to one another, and to me through combinations of associations that shift like specks of sand in the wind.  If I become ‘mindfully aware’ of this fact, I find myself marveling that there is some core cognizant centralized self of Linda that is aware of itself in this lifetime as being anything other than a figment of a passing (and passed) dream.

So if any Ivory Tower researcher wants to devise a study that might provide any really useful or accurate information about what dissociation, depersonalization and derealization might actually BE, they might want to study the consciousness-invested relationship any severe infant-child abuse survivor might have with their automobile’s steering wheel.

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